Groups pledge US$450mil to save forests

SAN FRANCISCO: Leading philanthropists pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to rescue shrinking tropical forests that suck heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, on the eve of a global climate change summit in San Francisco.

Nine foundations announced the US$459mil (RM1.9bil) commitment, to be delivered over the next four years, a day ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit, which is expected to draw about 4,500 delegates from city and regional governments.

“While the world heats up, many of our governments have been slow to act. And so we in philanthropy must step up,” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, told journalists at an event announcing the pledge.

The commitment roughly doubles the funds the groups currently dedicate to forest protection, said David Kaimowitz, a director at the Ford Foundation, one of the donors.

Charlotte Streck, director of Amsterdam-based think tank Climate Focus, said the size of the commitment makes the groups major players in supporting anti-deforestation programmes.

Norway has led donor efforts by pledging up to US$500mil (RM2bil) a year to help tropical nations protect their forests, Streck said.

But the new money committed by foundations could prove more “flexible and nimble” than money from governments, she said.

“The money that has been pledged by the governments like Norway and Germany, the UK, sits mostly in trust funds with the World Bank and the UN and it doesn’t get out so quickly,” she said.

Other groups that are part of the new initiative include the MacArthur Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation.

Funds will mostly assist indige- nous people who are forest dwellers, including by helping them secure titles to land they live on so it cannot be sold to private companies without their agreement, said Walker.

“Companies come to our village, our forests and say: ‘You have to leave because I have the license from the government’,” said Rukka Sombolinggi, who heads the Indonesia-based Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago.

The world loses the equivalent of 50 soccer fields’ worth of forest every minute, organisers said.

Yet forests absorb a third of the annual planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions produced – and those emissions need to be slashed substantially more to meet the goals set in the Paris agreement. —

While the world heats up, many of our governments have been slow to act. And so we in philanthropy must step up. Darren Walker